A Guest Post By Alicia Eler

I first came across Lilli Carré’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition “New Chicago Comics” (Jan 8–30, 2011). I had been thinking about women cartoonists ever since seeing the exhibition StatiCCreep at Chicago’s Las Manos Gallery that same month. Here’s my interview with Chicago-based Lilli Carré, an animator and a cartoonist who makes comics, illustrations and hand-drawn, animated short films.

Alicia: When did you first start drawing? What led you to comics/cartoons as opposed to painting or drawing?

Lilli: I’ve always been a drawer, since I was a little kid. My parents would keep my sister and I occupied by just rolling out sheets of butcher paper on the floor; they’d give us pens and let us have at it. I grew up reading comics, but I started drawing them myself shortly after coming to Chicago to go to college. What draws me to comics and animation more than singular paintings and drawings is the narrative that can be built between putting images next to each other. I like writing stories, as well as the challenge of what can be told in the combination of images and text, rather than just one or the other. There’s such exciting exploration to be done there. I feel I can express my ideas best through storytelling, and in comics and animation there are really no limits to the world you can create, since all one needs is a pen and paper (and lots and lots of time of course). I like that in these mediums, I don’t need money or other people or a lot of resources to work on these projects, I mostly just need my ideas and a crazy work ethic.

Still from "Head Garden" by Lilli Carre

Alicia: Did you always know you wanted to be a cartoonist? What’s it like to tell stories through only images as opposed to telling stories through both image and text?

Lilli: As mentioned in the previous question, I began to make comics after starting college here. There were so many great alternative and self-published comics in Chicago, I started reading a lot of interesting new work that I hadn’t come across before, and it jumpstarted my interest in making comics myself and putting them out in the same way. I started doing animation in school first, and I figured out how I drew my characters, how I would build stories from a blank white slate. Also through animation, you have to draw things so many times over and over, it really makes you simplify your forms, and represent objects, people and landscapes through fewer lines. Once I started drawing that way, it was easy to translate that style to comics, though it was refreshing to be able to focus on each panel a little more than every frame of an animation. The reason I switch back and forth between working in animation and then working in comics is that they sort of relieve each other– sometimes it feels good to draw many frames more fleetingly, where each drawing itself doesn’t matter as much but I’m rather thinking of the overall shape and movement of the group of images altogether, more intuitive work. When that becomes exhausting, I can switch to working on a comic, where the whole page composition is considered and I get to spend a good amount of time on each panel. I usually work on more abstracted narratives in animation and use comics to tell stories that are more clearly narrative or structured, although they sometimes walk the line between the two.

To answer the other part of your question, I don’t know what I was wearing when I started working in comics and animation, I might have been sitting wearing several sweaters. I never declared “And now, I will be a cartoonist!”, but I increasingly got excited about working in these forms, and now I can’t help but constantly think of new stories that I want to put to paper in both of these ways, and I can’t imagine stopping.

"Nine Ways To Disappear" by Lilli Carre

Alicia: You also illustrate stories that you write, like Nine Ways to Disappear. How do you find it different illustrating your own stories as opposed to illustrating stories by other people, like The Fir Tree, an adaptation of a Hans Christan Andersen story.

Lilli: For illustrating my own stories in Nine Ways to Disappear, it was different than my usual comics because it was just one panel per page, so therefore seemed more like illustration since the images weren’t being read next to each other in classic comics format. I wanted to make the book feel like a little picture book, and for most of the stories in the collection, I wrote out the words and then illustrated each line one at a time. It was just a different way of working that I hadn’t done before, and it allowed me to work piece by piece rather than have the whole thing scripted and mapped out like usual. As far as The Fir Tree, It was cool to be asked to work with a narrative other than my own, let alone a story by Hans Christian Andersen, whose wildly depressing fairytales I love. I didn’t want to change his text at all, and it became more of an illustration project rather than a comic. There are many earlier editions of the story with quaint and solemn illustrations, and I wanted to give the story a completely different feel through my more stylized full color illustrations of it, to contrast the darkness of the text. I liked the challenge of trying to give a new face to an older story.

Lilli: I’ll just name a few of my influences in a short list here, because a question like this is always hard to answer, as there are so many ways to respond: Norman McLaren, Priit Parn, Harry Smith, Roy Andersson, Tove Jansson, Samuel Beckett, weather, Julie Doucet, Mark Beyer, George Herriman, Mike Leigh, early Lucas Arts computer games, Charles Laughton, personal life events, the Chicago Imagists, Jean Renoir, Mad Magazine, Chicago, the west coast, White Noise, John Cheever stories, plants.

Lilli: I get the most work done during daylight hours. Sometimes I have trouble concentrating at night, I get fidgety. I think I’m more efficient when I feel like I have to make the best of the day at the start of the morning, when I get out of bed, make my coffee and assess the best thing to work on and get started right away. I feel like I have a self-imposed constant pressure to use my time to get a good chunk of work done each day. My life is very much run by a strong sense of guilt about needing to do this at all times, which I suppose helps me work but I can’t shake it. I also work a part-time job three days a week and do freelance illustration/animation, so my independent projects are worked on between those things. The way my life is right now, I make just enough money to squeak by, while still having some time each week to work on my comics and animation projects. In a dream life I’d have more time to do this, but for now this’ll do, and there’s nothing like a Chicago winter to make you want to stay inside under a blanket and work away!

To see more of Lilli Carre’s work, check out her website: http://lillicarre.com/